You’re too young to remember the worst high school shooting in the country’s history, but no doubt you’ve heard of ‘Columbine.’

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold begin to shoot—indiscriminately—students and teachers at their high school. As the tragedy unfurled, students trapped on the campus called not only 911, but news stations as well. Some of these students had televisions and were looking at the news while they talked. This led to the mythmaking of what we now think of as the Columbine story. Many who were trapped didn’t know what was going on around them—they had to hide for many hours (even after the shooters had killed themselves), waiting for the SWAT teams to secure the school. They saw what news programs said—school shootings are committed by outsiders, loners with no friends, boys who are bullied, goths in trench coats who are often gay. They then repeated these things back to newscasters and the myth was born. (Why these newscasters were endangering the lives of these students by chatting with them while the tragedy unfolded is beyond the scope of this review.)

In Columbine, Dave Cullen tells us what really happened that day. He disproves the myths of aliened and bullied shooters, the Trench Coat Mafia, and of religious martyrs, instead showing the reader how difficult it is to recognize and stop a psychopath. Using the killers’ diaries and videotapes and interviews with survivors, witnesses, family members, school personnel, local police, the SWAT team, FBI psychologists, and more, Cullen details the worst high school shooting in the country’s history. His research took ten years.

The truth starts with the fact that the killers were not targeting people who bullied them. In fact, they had made and planted several bombs, with the intention of blowing up the whole school and everyone in it. And yet they were fairly popular guys who had friends and dates with girls. They worked at a local pizza place. They actually appear pretty normal to others. Only with a closer look, does one see that Eric was a psychopath—and very good at fooling peers and adults alike—and that Dylan was very depressed, even suicidal, and a follower who did what Eric asked.

Eric and Dylan left many clues to their plans although they didn’t discuss them with others. I think this book is important for many reasons, but one is that it shows us that the troubles these two boys had were the same as the troubles of many teens. But they do a few things that should have set off raging alarms in friends who knew. The problem is that friends don’t imagine that people they know—and have known for years—as the type to become killers. Teen should know, without a doubt, that if friends of theirs start wanting help in buying sawed-off shotguns or are making pipe bombs, there’s a reason for that. And someone—maybe more than one someone—is going to get killed. It’s time to call We Tip Anonymous. Now.

Cullen dispels other Columbine myths as well—Danny Rohrbough didn’t die saving other s students. Cassie Bernall didn’t martyr herself by professing her faith in God and then being shot for it. We have deep sympathy for the family of murdered teacher and coach Dave Sanders (who really was saving others), knowing that he was left for hours to bleed to death and might have been saved if the police and SWAT teams had been more organized. We also find out what Patrick Ireland was thinking when, seriously wounded with multiple shoots (including one to the head), he climbed out a window, launching himself when rescuers weren’t ready to catch him. Patrick’s escape is famous because it played on live television.

This was a very difficult book for me to read. Paradoxically, I was riveted at times and couldn’t stop. But once I got to the end of a section, I had to take a break and had a hard time picking it up again. After all, there was no chance of a happy ending. But it’s important for all of us to read books like this. The fact that this book can dispel myths only after so much research is a general argument for reading books, not just instant news reports. I think the move in education away from deep, sustained reading to cursory looks at ‘passages’ from ‘informational texts’ (there’s a little Orwellian Newspeak for you) is a huge mistake. But that’s a story for another day.

I want to make one more comment on Cassie Bernall. We have the book, written by her mother, entitled She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall in our library. It is now clear that the story of the minutes before Cassie’s death—in which one of the shooters asked her if she believed in God and she answered yes; then, after he asked her why, shot her before she could answer—is not true. Knowing this, do I still think the book is worth reading?

I do think She Said Yes is worth the reading. While many are critical of a segment of the evangelical Christian community for perpetrating the martyr myth, which they knew from the beginning was most likely false, I don’t think Cassie’s last minutes are the real point of the book—or the power of it. Before Cassie became a reborn Christian, she was a pretty messed up teen. Her behavior was strange and the outcomes of her habits and friendships could have been dire. That’s the point that Misty Bernall is making. When kids do strange things, parents have to take action. Cassie’s friend was writing notes suggesting that the two of them kill Cassie’s parents and drawing horrific images of the bloody bodies. Cassie’s parents got a handle on that and helped her to turn her life around. They could only do so by being very involved.

As to what Eric’s parents might have done had they known about his psychopathic nature, it’s hard to say. Cullen argues, citing experts, that psychopaths can’t be helped with therapy; in fact, they learn in therapy how to better fool people, which is something they love to do. Of the ten types of identified psychopaths, two can be murderous, and Eric was one of those—he demonstrated in his secret journals that he was sadistic and had a God complex. All psychopaths think of people as objects and have no empathy. When I discussed this with my husband, who is a psychologist with a Ph.D., he wondered if the book said anything about Eric having been treated as an object himself as a child. I told him no, that the description of Eric’s parents shows them to be pretty normal. He took issue with the idea that a psychopath is just born that way. (I told him he’d have to read the book.)

Sadly, the reader feels that there is one way that the Columbine killings could have been prevented, and that is better police work. The police department knew a good deal about the things Eric and Dylan were doing, knew about website posts with threats etc., but didn’t notify the parents, and later destroyed evidence of their knowledge.

Columbine is an important work that sets the record straight.

Just announced! This year’s California Young Reader Medal Winner!

The California Young Reader Medal is a special award because unlike most other book awards, students nominate the books through their teachers and/or librarians. Students choose the winner by reading and voting for their favorite book in each category.

This year’s winner is Graceling by Kristin Cashore.

I love to see what teens will choose. I read this novel (review is here) and could immediately see why teens would like it–the protagonist is a very strong girl and the world she lives in is magical–but for my own part, I found it repetitive and an exercise in adverbs-gone-wild. And this is why it’s good to have an award that teens choose themselves. And it’s also why I love the idea that we have a library and the opportunity to choose what we want to read, not just cram for tests.

Exercise your FREADOM right here in our library. I bought multiple copies of Graceling just after I read it–thought it might be a hit!

The author is a Nobel Laureate in Economics (2002) and a psychologist by education and training. Thinking Fast and Slow just won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest this past weekend. Clearly, this is a very important book. While such a book would be a good read for smart teens who are heading off to college, I don’t imagine too many will have the time to get through it soon—it’s 450 pages not including the notes and index, and the information is dense. But for educators who are looking at a changing world, this study of decision making helps us to understand fallacies in thinking and to avoid them. It’s a great choice for a serious read, and I ‘think’ that’s why it’s been on the bestseller’s list for months running.

For the sake of ease, Kahneman identifies as two systems our fast thinking and our slower thinking. (These are not systems in a real, biological sense.) Mostly, we use the fast thinking—and mostly it is efficient, giving us what we need. But when we don’t understand something automatically, we have to employ our slower thinking, and that’s where problems start. The slower thinking is lazy and can push back to the faster (and incorrect) response jut to get out of a mental workout.

Kahneman uses statistics to show us how we go wrong in many areas. One fun discussion is on whether super successful people are smarter than others or just luckier than others who also work hard but are less successful. (Mostly lucky—very lucky. But also very immune to worry about failure. They are often good at blaming others or the situation, rarely see themselves as at fault, and so will try over and over when logic would tell another person to give up or at least cop to the fact that s/he has been making big mistakes. Kahneman says if there is one quality you could wish for your kids, it should be optimism.)

I don’t agree with everything Kahneman says. (Actually, I never entirely agree with anything that anyone says   .) His example of bad thinking in the section “Linda: More is Less” doesn’t take into account that linguistic implicatures are the basis for folks thinking it is more probable that someone is part of a subgroup than part of the larger group. (Example: Linda is involved in women’s rights organizations. Is it more probable that Linda is a bank teller or that Linda is a feminist bank teller?) People really aren’t confused about groups and subgroups just because they were preloaded with information about the subject in question. They’re using the known language patterns of the question to come up with a response.

Honestly, this book is a cornucopia of studies/original research about judgments and choices—political, economic, personal finances, selection of the best candidates for jobs. (Job interviews often lead to the selection of the inferior candidate—but he’ll have charisma. Smart employers look at past performance and hire on that.) It deals with intuition, and how regression to the mean isn’t just about height and smarts. If you read it, you’ll have a new way of thinking about kids, their possibilities (rather than their probabilities); you’ll see who in your class is receiving an unearned ‘halo effect.’ You’ll understand how to question students about their thinking so that they will be more likely to engage in the subject rather than pass it off to their fast thinking when they don’t understand it. As Library Journal says Thinking Fast and Slow is, “a stellar accomplishment, a book for everyone who likes to think and wants to do it better.”

In the year between June 2007 and June 2008, the Korengal Valley was the most dangerous place for a soldier to be at war. The daily temperatures of one hundred degrees, the rough and barren terrain, as well as the many unsympathetic locals (many village elders were working with the Taliban) compounded problems for Second Platoon, Battle Company, which was involved in more firefights than soldiers in any other area of the war, sometimes in more than one battle a day.

During this period, author Sebastian Junger was embedded with Second Platoon, Battle Company. He had photojournalist Tim Hetherington with him. They shot 150 hours of videotape and used that for their documentary film Restrepo. War received many notable book commendations and has been a bestseller. Restrepo received the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2011.

Junger tells us at the beginning of the book that he was wholly dependent on the Army for food, shelter, and protection, but that Army officials never tried to censor what he recorded nor to “alter [his] reporting in any way or to show the contents of [his] notebooks or [his] cameras.” So, this is a true picture of warriors in battle. Although it was published for an adult audience, it’s an important read for students who are considering joining a branch of the military because it does give such a realistic picture of war. And, it’s not a bad read for the rest of us either—Americans who are forgetting that one percent of our population is fighting this war without a whole lot of support from the rest of us.

War has scenes of intense battle and of the subsequent deaths and maiming, of how these losses affect the psyches of the men who are not physically harmed. (Junger is there when Second Platoon members are caught in an ambush and an IEU blows up their Humvee.) It also shows the boredom of the men between battles. And Junger delves into the warrior mentally in a way I haven’t read in another book. “War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.”

These men are some of the best trained soldiers around, but they are also undisciplined. “O’Byrne’s 203 gunner, Steiner, once got stabbed trying to help deliver a group beating to Sergeant Mac, his squad leader, who had backed into a corner with a combat knife. In Second Platoon you got beat on your birthday, you got beat before you left the platoon—on leave, say—and you got beat when you came back. The only way to leave Second Platoon without a beating was to get shot.”

Junger deals honestly with the fact that a lot of guys in Second Platoon live for the high, for the adrenaline rush, of being in a firefight, of shooting weapons. He shows that returning to civilian life is often difficult for them because they can’t get that rush back. They also can’t duplicate the intense love they have for one another in a situation where each would, without a second thought, sacrifice his life for his warrior brothers. “’I never got in trouble, but Bobby beat up a few MPs, threatened them with a fire extinguisher, pissed on their boot. But what do you expect from the infantry, you know? I know that all the guys that were bad in garrison were perfect f– soldiers in combat. They’re troublemakers and they like to fight. That’s a bad garrison trait but a good combat trait—right?’”

Adults will remember Junger’s work from the bestselling books A Death in Belmont and The Perfect Storm (which was made into a movie). This is an equally good book, and I highly recommend it. It does contain a lot of profanity—perfectly natural as the soldiers are quoted frequently.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Incarceron is a vast prison—a varied landscape, created as an experiment in forever removing dangerous criminals from society, but generously placing them in an alternate world that meets all of their needs. Outside of Incarceron, no one knows what happens there. It is considered a sort of paradise. But over a few centuries, resources have become scare, and the inmates fight for basic necessities.

Incarceron can think. It watches its inmates and reacts to their movements. It’s a weird being that is aware of itself, but can never see outside of itself. It cannot meet its own desires, and comes to delight in making sure that no one ever escapes its walls, and that no one is ever let in from the outside. It creates new life by recycling what it has, although, unfortunately, the details of how this happens are glossed over.

As we meet Finn, a member of a band of rogue criminals (the Comitatus), he is risking his life to gain bounty. However, he’s not a typical criminal, but has a searing conscious. He is sure he’s from the Outside, and he has memories of another world which others around him believe are visions. He is marked as special, a starseer. He is seen as the one person who will be able to escape Incarceron, and when he comes in possession of a crystal key (no one has ever seen a key since there is no getting out of the prison), this belief becomes an adventure for Finn and his band of friends.

Meanwhile, on the Outside, Claudia, daughter of the powerful warden of Incarceron, is betrothed to the prince. She was originally betrothed to the true prince, a boy she favored, but he died under mysterious circumstances. The new prince, son of the queen, is neither bright nor kind. (And, yes, you can see just where all this is going.)

Incarceron has been embraced by professional reviewers, and they suggest that fans of Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games trilogy) will like it. That may be true. However, I think Incarceron is much more of a fantasy book than science fiction. The protocol under which the Outsiders live mean that their world appears as a seventeenth century European kingdom. They have futuristic technology, but it’s invisible to them. The stories of the evil queen, of Claudia’s power hungry father who thinks nothing of her unhappiness in his bid for royalty have a great appeal for fantasy readers.

I had a much tougher time with the book than the pros because the writing drove me a bit nuts. There were too many sentences with unnecessary words—something like “Hump,” he said disgruntledly. (That’s not a direct quote, but so much of the dialogue had that unnecessary sort of tagging.) There was also a lot of nondescriptive description like, ‘He muddied his beautiful boots.’ (How about alligator skin boots? Or lion hide boots? Then we’d know exactly what they are and it would also tell us something about the character of the person wearing them—a little bonus.)

Even though Incarceron was hard for me to get through, why reviewers like it is obvious. The world Fisher creates is deeply imaginative, a real accomplishment. The novel begins with fast action (and good writing, to give credit where credit is due). Had a different editor been on the job, I probably would have enjoyed it. And truth be told, I am not the target audience. Teen readers of fantasy are—and if you are among that group, I think this is one you’ll enjoy. With the bonus that there’s a sequel—Sapphique.

Both are in our library now.

When the child Celia Bowen is delivered to her father, the famous magician Prospero (Hector Bowen), a challenge is taken up. Prospero believes that magical talent is inborn. Celia is an example with her uncanny ability to alter the environment around her, even to heal the wounds in her fingers, which her father slices as a way of having her practice. Prospero’s rival, Alexander H. (the man in the gray suit) believes that anyone can learn incredible magic. The two have been fighting over magic for years. When Alexander picks Marco Alisdair, an orphan, as his student, the game is on. Which of the two will grow up to be the better magician?

The playing field for the challenge is the black and white Night Circus—Le Cirque des Rêves. Celia and Marco control it, Celia as an illusionist inside the circus, Marco from London, as the assistant to the proprietor. Each adds mysterious tents full of wonders—paper animals suspending in midair that move and breathe, indoor ice sculptures with no means of refrigeration, a wishing tree with lighted candles that never go out. And, of course, there is the blindingly white bonfire. Lit at midnight on the first night of the circus, at the same time that the lion tamer’s twins were born, its supernatural powers hold the circus together.

In fact, the magic of the circus is awe-inspiring, and, although the circus always comes and goes unannounced, fans follow it, even to Europe. Everyone in the circus is caught in the magic; no one, except the twins, ages.

This would be the perfect dream if there weren’t a sinister element to the contest, one that neither Celia nor Marco knew of as they were brought up, unknown to one another, to compete. This is a game to the death. When Marco and Celia do meet, they fall in love. The flights of fancy they create at the circus are for one another. But how do they get out of the challenge alive?

The Night Circus moves back and forth in time between 1873 and 1903. I think this might be confusing to some teen readers, but my recommendation is just to lose yourself in the magic and not worry about the year. It will all come together nicely at the end. Meanwhile, the descriptions of the circus—the sights, the sounds, the smells of caramel and chocolate—is a feast for the senses.

Fans of paranormal books, of romance, adventure, and magic will love this book. Although it’s a much different story than Harry Potter, I think Potter fans will thrill to this one. A lovely adult book for teen readers looking for a textured read.

It’s 2044 and the world is such a rotten place for most people that they spend as much time as possible on the OASIS, a virtual universe where you can not only play video games, but go to school, and do most other things that you’d normally do in real life. It’s a sort of Second Life on steroids, populated with endless planets containing any landscape or idea a person could imagine. In fact, life on the OASIS is valued more than real life when real life stinks.

I think the publisher’s blurb gives you a good summary, so I’ll quote it below. (I don’t usually quote what publishers say because they mostly oversell the book—which isn’t a problem because that’s their job. I just don’t often agree with blurbs.)

I came to read this novel because it was recommended in professional reviews as a great adult book title for teens. (Longer, adult books with teen appeal are something I’m currently looking for.) I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Ready Player One since I’m not a gamer. So—you don’t have to be a gamer either to get into the adventures, the perils and the fantasies of Parzical. Art3mis, and Aech (‘H’). But I do want to add that if you have any love of the 1980’s—arcade games, videos games, movies—you will have a blast with all the fantastic detail of 80’s entertainment that are recreated on the OASIS as the gamers compete for a multi-billion dollar inheritance. This is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while.

OK—here’s the publisher’s blurb. Right now Ready Player One is only available at the city library, so I encourage you to use your Ontario City Library card and check it out!

“At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

“It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

“Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

“And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them..

“For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

“And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

“Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

“A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?”

“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. . . . But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can’t be contained to one way of thinking. And that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled.”

Beatrice Prior is a Divergent. And she’d better keep that a secret. Because in the future, specifically in the future Chicago of the novel, society is broken down into five factions based on the qualities of character that individuals demonstrate. The motto “Faction before blood” means that families are less important than factions. At sixteen, children attend a ceremony in which they choose the faction they will live with from then on. To choose a faction different from that of his parents means that the teen will be separated from his family for life.

Beatrice is from the Abnegation faction, the group of people who are self-sacrificing. They run the government since it is unlikely that they will make selfish grabs for power. The four other factors are: Candor (always tells the truth, no matter how rude or mean); Amity (friendship); Erudite (intelligent and bookish—love learning); and Dauntless (brave, fierce).

Living in the Abnegation faction is hard. Everyone is expected to always give up comforts for others. They are nice, they take turns, they listen to others, they don’t worry about fashion (all clothes are gray), and they don’t speak up before hearing someone else’s issues. Still, despite the lack of individualism in this, as a group, Abnegation plays nice. Not all groups do.

Like all sixteen year olds, Beatrice goes through a simulation that, based on her reaction to various situations, will indicate to which of the five factions she belongs. But her simulation results are inconclusive. She reacts to the virtual dangers as an Abnegation, a Dauntless, and an Erudite. The woman monitoring the simulation whispers that she is a Divergent. This is dangerous. She is not to tell anyone, but she should choose a faction. Unsure of what she should do, Beatrice (hence forward Tris) chooses Dauntless.

The Dauntless, traditionally brave, have the job of protecting the city. But in recent times, the leaders are more sadistic than courageous and the initiates are treated cruelly and encouraged to be brutal to one another. Only ten initiates will be accepted into the faction. Those who are cut will be factionless for the rest of their lives, impoverished nobodies, living on the street. The vicious, even gruesome, initiation process is heart-stopping. You won’t be able to stop reading through it—and it covers most of the book.

At the same time the initiates are vying for a spot in Dauntless, there is a rumor that Abnegation is misusing its power and that the Erudite want war and hope the Dauntless will cooperate. One of the young trainers of the initiates is Four, who tells Tris, “They don’t want you to act a certain way. They want you to think a certain way.” As a Divergent, her mind isn’t easy for others to control, so she’s a primary target, a girl who may be able to help Abnegation because of her many qualities.

If you’re looking for a good read after finishing The Hunger Games trilogy, this is a great choice. (I think the cover even tries for a subconscious Hunger Games feeling.) Be mindful that it’s for mature readers who aren’t sickened by the violence, which is excessive and somewhat repetitive. And, yes, the romance is there, too, a very sweet one that will have you rooting for Tris and Four. This is obviously the beginning of a trilogy. We don’t even know how the world outside of Chicago functions—whether this is something neglected by the writer as she was swept away with her descriptions of Dauntless sadism or purposeful, something we will learn as society breaks apart and moves outward. But we will certainly check out ‘book two’ because we want to find out.

When Christopher Creed disappears from Steepleton, the rumors fly. He spent his life being bullied, and his disappearance seems the obvious outcome for a high-school misfit. With only a cryptic email to the school principal to provide clues, the town is awash in rumors. Did Chris run away? Did he commit suicide? Was he murdered?

Torey Adams is a super popular guy. He has an A-list girlfriend, he’s a football player. He’s also mentioned in Christopher’s goodbye email. And thereby becomes a suspect in Christopher’s disappearance. Wishing to set the record straight, Torey becomes involved in his own investigation of Chris’s disappearance. He finds out that some of the best people to depend on in Steepleton are others who are also misfits—Christopher’s neighbor, Ali, who has an (undeserved) reputation as the school slut and her boyfriend, Bo, who is a ‘boon,’ a guy from the boondocks, considered angry white trash.

To help in his search, Torey sets up a website about Christopher’s story. He, Ali, and Bo begin to suspect foul play by Christopher’s own mother, who seems to be mentally unstable. They get involved in breaking and entering Chris’s home in hopes of finding a diary. Torey has a frightening session with a psychic, and he feels that Chris’s body is in the old Indian graveyard behind his house.

I read this novel when it came out about 10 years ago and loved it. It was the first book about bullying that I’d read with a realistic characterization of the bullied boy. Christopher is weird. He is irritating. He says and does entirely inappropriate things.  But does that mean it’s OK to berate him, use him as a punching bag? Of course not, but the kids in Steepleton do, and then when he goes missing, they all point the finger at someone else. They are mean, mean, mean—and unwilling to take responsibility for their behavior. Having a few of them learn to do so makes the book a great read. Add to that the suspense with entering the Creed home, the psychic, the graveyard in storming weather. Totally compelling.

What reminded me of this book after more than a decade (read in those pre-blogging days) is that a sequel came out recently, Following Christopher Creed. I had to read it to find out what happened to all the characters, especially Ali, Bo, and Torey.

Well, you know I’m afraid that if I say something is wonderful just to get you to read it, you won’t trust me again if I’m overstating the case. So, the truth: I was disappointed in the sequel, mostly because the pace of the book is really off. It drags quite a bit because it’s repetitive. I think the repetition is the author’s effort to have everything make sense for the reader who never read The Body of Christopher Creed. But it doesn’t work. If you don’t read the first book, you won’t get a good sense of the three characters I mentioned—Ali, Bo, and Torey.

In Following Christopher Creed, a college newspaper reporter, Mike Mavic, comes to Steepleton to write a story about the whole Christopher Creed disappearance. He was bullied himself—in fact, he is almost blinded in a bullying incident and has a service dog to guide him.  He’s always been interested in Torey Adams’s website about Creed and follows it for the five years since Creed disappeared.

Mike arrives in town just after reading about the discovery of a body, a possible murder victim, that he read about on the Creed website. He interviews locals and finds the town still much affected by the Creed disappearance, but no one has gotten any nicer. If anything, the teens are the same bullying crowd, seeking weakness in others, with the hope of hurting them.

Mike connects with Christopher’s younger brother, Justin, who has big problems of his own. He’s bipolar and has recently become an addict as he tries to self medicate. In his manic states, he believes that he can use the power of ‘quantum thought’ to draw Christopher back to him. With his wild unpredictability, the vicious town teens, the strange occurrences in the lightning field (where lightning seems to come up out of the ground instead of from the sky), the decomposing body in that field—well, there is a lot to pull the reader through the story.

If you’re like me and want to find out about all those favorites characters from the first book, I do recommend that you read Following Christopher Creed—just speed-read and skip through the repetition. The end is quite a shocker.

Horror: The Top Ten for Teens

With teachers bringing classes in for horror and mystery book talks near Halloween, I thought it was a good time to look at our collection of teen horror and update it. One of the problems I have anymore is in defining horror. So many books with vampires, werewolves and zombies are just romances with differently-abled characters. One of the book review magazines I read –Booklist—decided to rescue librarians by picking their favorite ten teen horror novels. None of the novels are heartwarming nor are they romances.

They’re horror.

I had most of the titles at Colony, but none at Chaffey, so I went shopping. (So Tigers, check before Halloween. I think they’ll be here.) I read my first on the list. And, yes, I thought it had the creepy factor. It’s also by the author whose books are most often challenged right now—and since it’s Banned Books Week and since our frosh classes are having a look at this author—I decided to start with Lauren Myracle.

Bliss by Lauren Myracle

Publisher’s blurb on the novel: Having grown up in a California commune, Bliss sees her aloof grandmother’s Atlanta world as a foreign country, but she is determined to be nice as a freshman at an elite high school, which makes her the perfect target for . . . a girl obsessed with the occult.

Reason Booklist picked it: Creepiest sleepover scene of all time.

What other pros say: Publishers’ Weekly “Charles Manson Family murders, racism, ghosts, blood sacrifices and prom queens–and, remarkably, supports this outré mix with clever timing and well-placed red herrings.”

VOYA: “kept me reading all through the night. It’s geared toward a mature audience of readers who are strong in what they believe.”

What I have to say: hippie-dippy craziness of the Summer of Love (1969) turns sinister, plus the main character has an ESP connection with spirits, so what’s better than that? Myracle does make it better with deeper probing of the period—the KKK; interracial dating; the Charles Mansion Family murders (The Tate-LaBianca murders) set against the ultra-sweet popular TV show of that time, The Andy Griffith Show, and the wonderful town of Mayberry.

No silly, make-believe endings here. This one’s serious enough for your teachers to love—a good choice for outside reading. In general, it’s not blood and guts violence, but it is for mature readers because it is creepy, creepy, creepy.